Motherhood In Sula Research Paper

1274 Words6 Pages
Motherlove and maternity are key concepts in Toni Morrison's novel, Sula. The portrayal of a mother in today’s society is typically nurturing, gentle, and supportive. The novel does not address these positive aspects of motherhood, but rather focuses on the destructiveness of a mother’s love. Dayle B. Delancey suggests that the "leitmotif of motherlove as killer" (1) is the main theme in the novel. Diane Gillespie and Missy Kubischek also propose that women proceed through three stages of moral development (28), stages that may influence a mother’s decisions when caring for her children. The stages develop in unconventional ways in the novel as a result of the dangerousness of motherlove. In Sula, Toni Morrison depicts motherlove as a destructive…show more content…
The blockage of Plum’s bowels incites an innate, maternal instinct in Eva to protect her child, regardless of the damage to her own well-being. She brings him to the outhouse in the middle of December with some lard, “the last bit of food she [has] in the world” (Morrison 34), and releases his bowels. There are several important incidents that happen in the few seconds of this event. First, she brings her child to a freezing outhouse in December to relieve him rather than letting him cry endlessly with a strong possibility of dying. Eva’s willingness to risk becoming ill for the sake of her son’s health shows that childrearing places additional jeopardies to a mother’s health. Secondly, Eva uses a small amount of lard to soften her insertion into Plum’s intestines and to reduce the pain that he might feel (Morrison 34). Using her last food source to prevent painful sensations in her child, Eva demonstrates her readiness to keep her children alive, even at the expense of losing resources necessary for survival. These two incidents prove that raising a child as a low-income, single mother is a tremendous responsibility and places extensive stresses on the mother as she struggles to keep herself and her children alive. After saving Plum, Eva then asks herself “what [she is] doing down on her haunches…in the almost total darkness, her shins and teeth freezing, her nostrils assailed” (Morrison 34), as if she did not consciously bring Plum to the outhouse. Plum’s pain from his illness activates an automatic response in Eva to save his life. Delancey claims that Eva denies the “exigencies of motherlove” (16) for her children, but a more compelling argument is that motherlove is an innate force that is present in all mothers that influences a woman’s actions, regardless of the potential of personal dangers in
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  • Motherhood In Sula Research Paper

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    Motherhood is viewed as universally nurturing, caring, and filled with involvement, but is this always the case? Do mothers have to actively shape their children’s lives to be considered a good mother or, more precisely, an effective mother? In Toni Morison’s Sula, two central mother-daughter relationships are presented that exemplify two extremes of motherhood. Both Sula and Nel live with mothers who lean towards the extremes of involvement: Hannah provides Sula with a relatively unsupervised childhood

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